Thursday, February 4, 2010

The first thing that struck me is its detached tone -- sort of like the curious look a child gives when looking inside a cage at an exotic animal. Probably this was written by someone who lives in Great Brittain, looking over the Atlantic ocean with mild curiosity at how crazy the US health care situation is.

The second thing that struck me is that the observation is very true. A huge majority of the population in this country would benefit from health care reform, including the public option. Those who cannot afford health insurance now, those with pre-existing conditions, etc.

Yet, many people who stand to benefit angrily fight reform. It's just plain weird. Here are two quotes from the article:

Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford?

In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all, opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%.

Finally, the two books referenced by the article certainly look relevant, roughly concluding that the average American doesn't really make decisions based on facts. (This also means "trial by a jury of your peers" is not a very comforting approach.) While I haven't read these books, I have come to the same depressing conclusion.

A democracy is only as effective as its population is at making rational decisions.

Why don't we have a public bank already? I mean a bank run by the federal government that competes with private banks, keeping them honest.

Let's recap what's happened in the past few years. First, the financial world collapsed (the risky sub-prime loans, CDOs, etc.). So, the federal gov't was forced to loan insane amounts of taxpayer's (and our children's future) money to the banks, just to barely keep them afloat. By and large, that worked: the banks have survived and recovered.

Yet, today they still pay out insane bonuses to their top employees, still fly around in private jets, throw lavish parties, travel to exotic places, etc. They are not extending the loans to small businesses that are required for our economy to really recover. And they are now spending lots of money, fighting the legislation that would regulate things to prevent a future collapse from happening again. In short, they have not changed.

Something has gone terribly wrong!

See, these banks don't contribute directly to economic progress. They don't build houses, invent new products, grow food, create more fuel efficient cars, etc. Really they are just the "lubrication" to enable all the real progress in our economy. They are not suposed to make tons of money, yet they do. And they most certainly shouldn't be given the power to hold our economy hostage, as they are today.

So why not create a public bank, run by the federal government, that would extend legitimate loans with reasonable terms, today? This would put a strong competitive pressure on the existing banks to lend, as the public bank would otherwise take customers away. It would be a much more direct way to stimulate the economy, than the "give lots of money to the banks and hope they loan it out instead of paying themselves fat bonuses" approach that is clearly not working very well today.

It could be a temporary creation, only around until the private banks start behaving well again. Or it could remain indefinitely, keeping the banks honest over time.

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About Me

Michael loves building software; he's been building search engines for more than a decade. In 1999 he co-founded iPhrase Technologies, a startup providing a user-centric enterprise search application, written primarily in Python and C. After IBM acquired iPhrase in 2005, Michael fell in love with Lucene, becoming a committer in 2006 and PMC member in 2008. Michael has remained an active committer, helping to push Lucene to new places in recent years. He's co-author of Lucene in Action, 2nd edition. In his spare time Michael enjoys building his own computers, writing software to control his house (mostly in Python), encoding videos and tinkering with all sorts of other things.